The New Nobility of the KGB Read Online Free PDF Page A

prevailed for almost a decade, but in the 2000s the FSB changed the rules of the game, claiming that many state secrets had been leaked as a result of democratic reforms and insisting that a regime of secrecy should be restored. In 2004, the Russian scientific community was horrified when Valentin Danilov, a physicist and a head of the Thermo-Physics Center at Krasnoyarsk’s State Technical University, was charged with espionage and sentenced to fourteen years in prison because of his center’s contracts with the Chinese. 7
     
    Environmental groups were singled out for particular attention. The most notorious case was that of the Norwegian group Bellona. Alexander Nikitin, an activist who had called attention to nuclear risks in the Russian submarine fleet, was arrested on February 6, 1996, and accused of espionage. Nikitin was finally acquitted, but not until December 1999. 8
     
    In November 2002 the premises of the Irkutsk organization Baikalskaya Ecologicheskaya Volna (Baikal Ecological Wave) were searched by the local department of the FSB. The organization’s mission was to monitor Lake Baikal, the oldest (25 million years) and deepest (1,700 meters) lake in the world, situated in southeast Siberia. The FSB announced that it had opened a criminal case against the organization for divulging state secrets, and simultaneously provided local newspapers with materials indicating that the environmental group was complicit in espionage. The charges were dropped in a matter of days due to public outcry. 9
     
    In the business community, Norway’s telecommunications corporation, Telenor, became an early target of the FSB’s spy campaign. In December 1998, Telenor formed a strategic partnership with VimpelCom, Russia’s leading cellular telecommunications operator, and by the mid-2000s Norwegians owned 26.6 percent of VimpelCom’s voting stock. 10 In 2005, Telenor was prevented by the FSB from buying additional shares that would have increased their ownership to 45 percent. The security service sent a letter to the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service ruling the stock purchase unacceptable because Vimpelcom was considered a strategic Russian company, and Telenor was suspected of intelligence activities with close ties to Norway’s secret services. 11 The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service refused to grant approval for the purchase.
     
     
    IN 2003, THE FSB appointed Nikolai Oleshko deputy head of the security service’s Investigative Directorate, which made him the chief spy hunter. Oleshko had begun his career tracking down spies within the Soviet Army Group in East Germany in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, he became known as an expert in such cases and was put in charge of investigating espionage cases in the directorate. In 2004, when he was elected head of the directorate, he began a restructuring campaign that gave high priority to counter-intelligence. The First Section, responsible for investigating spy cases, had a serious staff shortage. 12 According to lawyer Yuri Gervis, who served a decade in the KGB’s investigation department before resigning in 1993, “The professional employees are lost. For instance, the First, the so-called ‘spy section,’ has no investigators except for the chief of the section, who graduated from the FSB Academy. There is nobody to catch real spies, and therefore the FSB is making spies out of people who communicate with foreign organizations in the course of their work.” As result, “espionage cases are conjectural, weakly backed by evidence, and all classified top secret in order to conceal errors.” 13
     
    In 2004 Oleshko convinced the FSB’s leadership to put his First Section in charge of all regional branches, a move that increased the significance of the section and the importance of the “spy” department overall.
     
    The new system was given its first real test not long after it was established, when Oleshko’s officers were asked to intervene in a case that had almost